Apparatus for seating or inserting splines or strips into frame grooves for assembling screens or other fabric covered frames are known in the art for the purposes of facilitating assembly.
Generally, a window screen is made by assembling a frame of extruded edge members provided with a groove for receiving a spline for holding the screen. A sheet of screen material is cut to size and placed over the frame, and the spline or strip is forced into the groove lodging an edge of the screen with the spline in the groove. Once the spline is inserted at one point, the entire length of spline is inserted into the entire length of the groove by continuing to insert the spline while advancing around the frame in one direction. When this operation is done manually, a tool is used such as for example the one disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,072,471. Usually, a small leftover portion of the screen remains on the outside, and this portion is trimmed with a knife.
Devices are known in the art for either partly or fully automatically inserting the spline into the frame groove. U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,052,093 and 5,127,143 describe apparatus in which a screen placed along the edge of a supporting surface can have its spline inserted into its groove along one side member of the screen by either pulling a spline seating wheel along an edge of the table, or by moving the frame on a carriage along the surface of the table passing underneath a spline seating wheel, respectively. In both cases, the wheel is clamped into a seating position and can be raised above the frame to allow the screen to be repositioned to do another side member of the frame. U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,766,661 and 5,018,264 describe apparatus in which a carriage is mounted on a transverse gantry for moving the carriage transversely, the gantry being movable lengthwise so that the carriage can move over the entire surface of a table. A seal fitting wheel is mounted to the carriage and the carriage is driven while applying pressure to the wheel to insert a spline into a groove of the frame. In U.S. Pat. No. 4,766,661, the apparatus also positions the screen material over the frame and cuts the screen material as the spline is automatically inserted in front of the spline inserting wheel.
It has been found that in the prior art spline inserting apparatus, too much manual labor is required to insert the splines into the frame grooves, or that the apparatus is sophisticated and expensive to install.